FinOps Foundation Joins The Linux Foundation To Work On Best Cloud Financial Practices

Saksham Goel

7 months ago

Nonprofit organization Linux Foundation has announced its latest alliance with the FinOps Foundation via a virtual open source summit. The alliance is aimed at advancing the discipline through best practices, education, and standards.

The FinOps Foundation comprises 1,500 individual members from all over the world and represents more than 500 companies with revenues of at least $1 billion each. In a very similar manner to how DevOps revolutionized development by tearing silos and increasing agility, FinOps reinforces the business value of cloud by combining technology, and business and finance professionals with a new cultural set of knowledge and technical process. The associated companies include Atlassian, Autodesk, Bill.com, HERE Technologies, LiveRamp, Just Eat, Nationwide, Neustar, Nike, and Spotify, among others.

“Where there is technology disruption, there is opportunity for business transformation. FinOps is exactly this and represents a shift in operations strategy, process, and culture,” said Mike Dolan, vice president and general manager, Linux Foundation Projects. “This type of disruption and transformation is also where community and industry-wide collaboration play critical roles in enabling a whole new market opportunity. We’re pleased to be the place where that work can happen.”

The FinOps community defines criteria for cloud financial management and is expanding to education and certification across industries for this discipline. As part of this initiative, the Linux Foundation is announcing a new and free edX course called Introduction to FinOps. It is aimed at advancing education and knowledge in this developing field and fostering a community of growing professionals. This introductory course will address the fundamentals of FinOps and how it can positively influence an enterprise by creating a culture of accountability around the use of the cloud to help companies make efficient, timely, data-backed cloud decisions.

“Technology and business leaders are seeking support for understanding how to manage cloud technologies and spending across their enterprises and the FinOps Foundation brings to bear the resources required to enable them to innovate inside their companies,” said J.R. Storment, executive director of the FinOps Foundation. “With the Linux Foundation’s support, especially across its world-class training organization, we can serve this growing community.”

FinOps is an operating model for the cloud, that leads to a shift in couples’ systems, best practices, and culture to enhance the organization’s ability to understand cloud costs and make informed business decisions. FinOps makes sure that companies get the most out every dollar spent on their cloud. It drives spending accountability to the edge where developers are making purchase decisions, which introduces a new generation of unified processes to optimize buying efficiency and assign spending to teams.

Gartner forecasts that cloud spending would exceed $360B by 2022. However, financial teams don’t have much insight about where the revenue is being allocated within their organizations.

The result is unforeseen costs that are not adequately forecast or reported along with a lack of structured tooling. It can lead to substantial losses or failures in critical accounting practices. IT infrastructure procurement has shifted from taking days or weeks to seconds or minutes, which has dramatically accelerated the development of applications but also dramatically reduced the efficiencies in financial operations.

“As the cloud native movement deepens inside organizations large and small, understanding how to optimize the infrastructure footprint through cultural change and engineering practices is critical,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). “CNCF welcomes the FinOps Foundation to the Linux Foundation and we look forward to collaborating across communities to improve cloud financial management for all.”